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‘He was calling me ‘mate’’

Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 00:07

Sir, – May I suggest that If Denis Staunton has a problem with being addressed with the use of the word “mate”, (“He was calling me ‘mate’. I felt the blood rush up through my chest”, London Letter, January 19th) he is summing up why many working-class English people voted to leave the EU? As a practice so common as to be almost universal in England, such a visceral reaction to it perhaps can only suggest a distaste for the English in your columnist, your newspaper or perhaps your country that perhaps drove, in some small part, the vote to leave? Why be in a union with countries that clearly don’t like you?

Or perhaps it simply shows that Denis Staunton has been treated terribly cruelly by your paper in being sent to a city where there is great danger of being addressed as such in any interaction with a working-class or even middle-class person. – Yours, etc,

MARTIN PRATT ,

Wye,

Kent,

England.

Sir, – Perhaps if Denis Staunton is so thin-skinned as to have the friendly salutation of “mate” from a London cabbie drive him to thoughts of the Black and Tans burning Cork, it might be time for him to come home? – Yours, etc,